Thursday - June 19, 2008

Climate Change Theory: Could it all be up in the air?

Global warming forecast: Partly cloudy

How clouds respond to global warming poses a huge challenge for climate scientists, since clouds are far more changeable in real life than models can predict. However, experts do agree that the level of future global warming greatly depends on clouds.

A new study finds that natural variations in how clouds form could actually be causing temperature changes, rather than the other way around, and could also lead to overestimates of how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to greenhouse gas emissions.

“Since the cloud changes could conceivably be caused by known long-term modes of climate variability, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or El Niño and La Niña, some, or even most, of the global warming seen in the last century could simply be due to natural fluctuations in the climate system,” says lead author Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama-Huntsville.

Spencer and his co-author William Braswell point out that the paper doesn’t disprove the theory that humans are causing global warming. Instead, they report that “it offers an alternative explanation for what we see in the climate system which has the potential for greatly reducing estimates of mankind’s impact on Earth’s climate.”

“But we really won’t know until much more work is done,” he added. In addition to this article, Spencer has published several others that question the scientific consensus about climate change, which states that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are causing global warming.

Spencer has been taking the Earth’s temperature for 20 years now, and feels that if the temps are rising, then they are rising at a much lower rate than some alarmists believe.

   Tuesday - June 03, 2008

All your air are belong to us

Remember the Fairness Doctrine? The one that the libtards in and out of Washington want to resurrect? The theory behind the Fairness Doctrine is:

radio stations could be regulated in this way due to the limited spectrum of the public airwaves.

Source: Wikipedia. The airwaves are held, by government, in trust for the public.

It was, in other words, a government-created scarcity that justified government regulation. Much like the government-created gasoline scarcities under Nixon and Carter.

Now a whacko Goremon named Mary Wood is asserting that the air is held in trust by the government.

University of Oregon law professor Mary Wood is tired of waiting for government officials to take action on global warming. So she’s devised a new legal tool to hurry them up.

Drawing on her background in both natural resources and property law, Wood has developed a theory that claims the atmosphere is an asset that belongs to all but is held in trust by the government. The government has a legal obligation to protect that trust from harm, she argues, just as financial managers have a legal obligation to protect the monetary assets in their care.

I’m sure that BMEWS readers have figured where this is going…

“The main problem with climate is that no government is taking responsibility for it and our government is sitting idle while this catastrophe is unfolding,” Wood said.

“There’s no other body of law that requires the government to act. But a trustee has to act to protect the body of the trust.”

Yep. And the laws are already on the books. No need to debate!

From theory to practice

Greg Costello is one of the public interest attorneys evaluating Wood’s proposal as the basis for potential lawsuits. He thinks it could be a successful legal strategy because it’s grounded in a widely accepted principle of common law.

“Public trust doctrine is a doctrine everybody learns in law school. It goes back to Roman times,” said Costello, executive director of the Eugene-based Western Environmental Law Center.

“It’s a theory that seems well-suited and perhaps ideal when you’re talking about who owns the atmosphere.”

Be afraid. Be very afraid. 

HT: Neal’s Nuze

cross-posted at my blog Something’s Rotten

   Sunday - June 01, 2008

My Friend Mr. Sun

Explanation: Ten Earths could easily fit in the “claw” of this seemingly solar monster. The monster, though, visible on the lower left, is a huge eruptive prominence seen moving out from our Sun. The above dramatic image taken early in the year 2000 by the Sun-orbiting SOHO satellite. This large prominence, though, is significant not only for its size, but its shape. The twisted figure eight shape indicates that a complex magnetic field threads through the emerging solar particles. Differential rotation inside the Sun might help account for the surface explosion. Although large prominences and energetic Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, they are occurred more frequently near Solar Maximum, the time of peak sunspot and solar activity in the eleven-year solar cycle.

This is not the Sun as it is right now. This is:

I’m sure you notice the difference. And if you were wondering about sunspots, we’re still pretty much at ZERO:

The Maunder Minimum

Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715 (38 kb JPEG image). Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the “Little Ice Age” when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past. The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research.

Which could have just a little to do with the recent Gorebot’s whine that Glowball Worming is still with us, but might be taking a 10 year break. But, um, wouldn’t that break be considered Glowball Cooling?

Still, if you’re out in it working, wear a hat and some sunblock. Or else.

   Saturday - May 31, 2008

Goose-stepping into gorebull warming?

From the Middlebury Community Network comes this lengthy (I ‘printed’ it as a 26-page pdf file) gem that early on links goose-stepping and gorebull global warming. It starts off with an ‘editorial introductory note’:

Our planet has been slowly warming since last emerging from the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century…

I have to interrupt here. More like the 13th century. My source is the book “The Little Ice Age” which I read earlier this year. Even their source (Wikipedia) says the 14th century. Could be a typo. We continue:

...often associated with the Maunder Minimum.  Before that came the “Medieval Warm Period”, in which temperatures were about the same as they are today.

Another interruption. Sorry. Temps were higher then, as proved the fact that the Vikings colonized Greenland at the time.

Both of these climate phenomena are known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, but several hundred years prior to the present, the majority of the Southern Hemisphere was primarily populated by indigenous peoples, where science and scientific observation was limited to non-existent.  Thus we can not say that these periods were necessarily “global”.

However, “Global Warming” in recent historical times has been an undisputable fact, and no one can reasonably deny that.

Actually, I can reasonably deny it. Anyone who peruses the actual temperature graphs can’t help but notice that little statistical phenomena called the margin-of-error, which is usually left out of graphs shown on the news. Indeed it is not even mentioned.

But we’re hearing far too often that the “science” is “settled”, and that it is mankind’s contribution to the natural CO2 in the atmosphere has been the principal cause of an increasing “Greenhouse Effect”, which is the root “cause” of global warming.  We’re also hearing that “all the world’s scientists now agree on this settled science”, and it is now time to quickly and most radically alter our culture, and prevent a looming global catastrophe.  And last, but not least, we’re seeing a sort of mass hysteria sweeping our culture which is really quite disturbing.  Historians ponder how the entire nation of Germany could possibly have goose-stepped into place in such a short time, and we have similar unrest.  Have we become a nation of overnight loonies?

In a word, Yes. At this point the narrative breaks to show several pictures of loonies protesting. I’m particularly bemused by the last one on the right. The sign says ‘Global Warming Costs Lives’. As indeed it will, if the loonies’ ‘fixes’ are actually put into effect.

   Thursday - May 29, 2008

The phoney climate change war is upon us.  (Found in a Liberal? paper)

From The TimesMay 27, 2008

Personal carbon credits: the trick
The phoney climate change war is upon us. We’re are being drawn into a Blitz spirit
Mick Hume

Get out your gas masks and tin hats. We are under attack from a noxious army of doom-troopers demanding that we treat climate change as a rerun of the Second World War. In the latest move to militarise everyday life, the Environmental Audit Committee of MPs has seriously proposed energy rationing, aka “personal carbon credits”.

What next? Little (green) Hitlers patrolling the streets yelling “Put that high-energy light out!”?

Or a campaign to bring back rickets? Everybody from the Prince of Wales to liberal newspapers and former Labour ministers now compares climate change to the war. Baroness Young of Old Scone, head of the Environment Agency, says this is “World War Three”. If it’s not breaking the Official Secrets Act, could somebody explain what on earth they are on about?

The notion of a “war on carbon” makes even less sense than the glorious “wars” on terror/drugs/crime/whatever.

No, these evocations of the past appear political rather than practical. The aim is to create an ersatz Blitz Spirit that could bring people together behind a phoney war on global warming. Governments desperate for a unifying cause are naturally sympathetic. But they are also aware that hard-up Brits who see few bombs falling are unlikely to be too keen on making wartime sacrifices. Thus new Labour, which previously admitted it might “need to go back to rationing”, has retreated from the carbon credits proposal, fearful of further voter desertions.

What solution do the doom-troopers propose to the problem of public resistance? Let’s suspend democracy, like we did in the good old days! While one leading liberal writer insists that all the main parties must include identical austerity measures in their manifestos (not much change there then), another feminist veteran, Rosie Boycott, demands that they dump party politics altogether and form a national coalition based on Churchill’s wartime Government. Altogether now: “We will fight them in the recycling bins...”

The most depressing thing for me is that the Left is leading this retreat into wartime bunkers with relish, claiming that sharing out the misery is “progressive”. Whatever happened to raising people’s living standards and tackling serious social problems by moving forwards rather than back? That’s why it was called “progress”. And if you do want a lesson from history, note that the US economy met the challenge of the Second World War by doubling its output.

When the misery of rationing finally ended in 1954, people held ceremonies to celebrate and the power minister publicly burnt a big replica ration book. No doubt today he would be dragged over the coals for the war crime of carbon emission.

http://tinyurl.com/5rtukl

   Tuesday - May 20, 2008

Al Gore go away, don’t come back another day

What the heck? It’s the middle of May. Summer is right around the corner.

It was 37 degrees out when I got up. We had the heat on last night. It’s been 20 degrees below normal for several days now; cold and wet like November. I swear I saw snowflakes last night. Snow in May? Sure, in Binghamton NY, the weather pivot* of the north east, the place where winter hides as long as possible. But in central western New Jersey? Crivens, we hardly even had winter this winter. There were weeks in January and February when it was this cold, but without the precipitation.

Personally I blame Al Gore. He’s got to be around here somewhere, forcing God to make the rest of us suffer from Al’s curse. Damn Global Warming. Now I have to dig out the sweaters again.






* weather pivot? Sure, watch the national radar map on the TV weather. Binghamton is located on the southern end of NY, along the east side of the “flat part” along the PA border, just west of the “wiggly part” that heads southeast down to New York City. Watch the cloud systems come east and make a turn as they pass over Binghamton. That’s why they get extra weather there; the clouds have to pile up to make the corner, similar to NJ drivers on an exit ramp. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens often enough.

SLIGHTLY OFF TOPIC UPDATE:

Al Gore has been awarded ONE MILLION DOLLARS by the Dan David Foundation in Israel for alerting the world to the GW crisis. That’s right, Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. He’s right up there in history now with Paul Revere. Summna batch, that fargin icehole.

Al Gore received a $1 million prize on Monday for his environmental work from an Israeli fund.

The Dan David Foundation awarded the former vice president its annual “present” prize for alerting the world to the crisis from the overuse of fossil fuels. It also gave prizes in “past” and “future” categories. The Nobel laureate received the award at a ceremony at Tel Aviv University.

In his address, Gore said, “We do face a planetary emergency. The phrase sounds shrill to many, but it is unfortunately quite accurate.”

Gore said 10 percent of the prize would go to young researchers and the rest to the Alliance for Climate Protection, an advocacy group he confounded and which works to change public opinion worldwide about the urgency of the climate crisis.

   Monday - May 19, 2008

Algore: Climate Warrior

what a load of crap ...

Al Gore Compares Global Warming Fight to World War II Fascism

Former Vice President Al Gore on Sunday told graduates of Carnegie Mellon University they could become part of the next “hero generation” in American history by solving environmental problems.

In a commencement address before a record crowd of about 10,000 people, the Nobel laureate said there had already been two “special generations” of Americans: the one that founded the country and the one that defeated fascism during World War II.

“You, I hope and expect, will be called upon to be part of the third hero generation in American history,” by countering the threat of global warming, he said.

“We face a planetary emergency,” Gore said. “The concentrations of global warming pollution have been rising at an unprecedented pace and have now given the planet a fever.”

Carnegie Mellon had provided “great leadership in confronting what I regard as the most serious crisis our civilization has ever confronted,” partly by becoming a major buyer of retail wind power, he said.

Alternative energy sources such as the sun and wind can replace fossil fuels, Gore said, but “we need one ingredient that you represent. We need political will; we need your dedication; we need your hearts.”

I know that commencement speeches are almost always a boring pile of drivel. But I think this takes things to a new low. A “hero generation”. For “fighting” global warming. Will they get medals for buying solar panels? Green ribbons for bravery for driving their eco-scooters across flyover country? Or will it be “Save 10 fish, get a prize!” campaigns?

Have at it ... I know BMEWS readers can come up with lots of good attributes, activities, and awards for our new generation of heroic Weather Warriors.

For me, posting will be light today. I’ve got windows to clean, lattice to install, etc, for my latest customer. I would have been hard at work already staining their decks, but we’ve had a lot of rain here the past few days, and today it’s quite chilly. You’ve got to have a few days of warm and dry before you put stain on outdoors wood, or else it won’t stick.

   Friday - May 16, 2008

Save The Earth: Stop Breathing Right Now!!!

Ok, now that Global Warming has wimped out and become Climate Change, and now that the Carbon Credits thing has begun to show itself as the scam that it is, the Eco-freaks have come up with a new gas we should all be afraid of. Nitrogen. Which makes up a mere 78% or thereabouts of our atmosphere. Nitrogen. You know, that stuff that plants can’t live without. The stuff that everything can’t live without actually. So now there’s too much of it, in the wrong form. And it’s all humanity’s fault, although the blame really ought to be given to Bush!! Well, just because. Why not, everything else is.

Studies say reactive nitrogen a growing hazard in the environment

While carbon dioxide has been getting lots of publicity in climate change, reactive forms of nitrogen are also building up in the environment, scientists warn.

“The public does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the world’s peoples without harming the global environment a tremendous challenge,” University of Virginia environmental sciences professor James Galloway said in a statement.

“We are accumulating reactive nitrogen in the environment at alarming rates, and this may prove to be as serious as putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Galloway, author of a paper and co-author of a second on the topic in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

While nitrogen alone is inert and harmless, reactive nitrogen compounds — such as ammonia — have been released by its use in nitrogen-based fertilizers and the large-scale burning of fossil fuels.

Various forms of nitrogen contribute to greenhouse warming, smog, haze, acid rain dead zones with little or no life along the coasts, and depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere, the researchers concluded.

The researchers propose ways to reduce nitrogen use, ranging from encouraging its uptake by plants to recovering and reusing nitrogen from manure and sewage and decreasing nitrogen emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

Let’s start a betting pool to guess which gas will be next in the Fear The Air shellgame. I’ll take hydrogen by next February. But I can guarantee you somebody is going to make a lot of money off of this. That’s how it always works. Raise the Fear, Reap the Profits. What a bunch of ester releasing, nitrogen rich, organic compost. Mooo!

Read all about this terrible problem right here at the INI (International Nitrogen Initiative) webpage brochure:

The Problem
There are two major problems with nitrogen: some regions of the world do not have enough reactive
nitrogen to sustain human life, resulting in hunger and malnutrition, while other regions have too much
nitrogen (due mainly to the burning of fossil fuel and to the inefficient incorporation of nitrogen into food
products) resulting in a large number of major human health and ecological effects.

The Challenge
The challenge of nitrogen is how to optimize the use of nitrogen to sustain human life while minimizing the
negative impacts on the environment and human health. It is critical to the health of humans and
ecosystems that this challenge be met. It is doubly critical because without action, future populations will
be more stressed either due to nitrogen limitations or due to nitrogen excesses.

So you can tell already what The Solution is going to be, right? OF COURSE it will be “fairer distribution” and the only way to make that happen is Worldwide Socialism! This Greenie Bullshit is so damned transparent. Shine a light under any bush and you’ll find that the roots are Red.

( I can see another solution. The general gist of the nitrogen movement will be to ban artificial fertilizers. Guaranteed. The hippies have been crying about that for decades. But the Turd World doesn’t have enough nitrogen in the soil for their agriculture. And nitrogen is released by organic decomposition. So let’s clean up our act, and send all our raw sewage to these countries. Spread it around evenly, about a foot deep. After that nobody will be able to say that they’re Piss Poor anymore, they’ll have plenty of nitrogen, and the odds are they won’t notice the smell anyway. )

   Wednesday - May 14, 2008

Did I miss the “Denial Of Reality” memo?

“BREAKING" NEWS ITEM:

US Declares Polar Bears “Threatened”

U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that the polar bear will receive protection as a “threatened” species under the U. S. Endangered Species Act. Conservation groups had petitioned the U.S. to give full “endangered” protection to the mammals — citing a rapid decline in Arctic sea ice, and U.S. government studies predicting a rapid decline for the bear population due to loss of habitat. The government was under federal court order to rule on the bears’ status by tomorrow.

Just in case you were wondering, here is yesterday’s picture of the sea ice, compared to the sea ice in mid January.

The purpley blob surrounded by white in the left area of both photos is Hudson Bay, where lots of P-bears live. Yeah, the ice is starting to melt. So is the snow cover on the land! Hello, Spring is already half over; summer starts in 5 weeks.

Lost of habitat indeed. The parts of the world where Ursus Maritimus (the old pole bar) lives are the least habitated areas on the planet. And the ice pack seems to be doing just fine. Heck, if this fellow is reporting things properly (looks that way to me) then there is actually far more ice around right this minute than is usual for this time of year, for the past 25 years!

On a global basis, world sea ice in April 2008 reached levels that were “unprecedented” for the month of April in over 25 years. Levels are the third highest (for April) since the commencement of records in 1979, exceeded only by levels in 1979 and 1982. This continues a pattern established earlier in 2008, as global sea ice in March 2008 was also the third highest March on record, while January 2008 sea ice was the second highest January on record. It was also the second highest single month in the past 20 years (second only to Sept 1996).

But, but, but, if it isn’t the ice pack, or the habitat, something must be killing of the polar bears. Right? Otherwise they wouldn’t get put on the Threatened List. Right? So maybe it’s from hunting? Just how few bears are left, and how many did there used to be? Well, according to Polar Bears International

“In the 1950s the polar bear population up north was estimated at 5,000. Today it’s 20- to 25,000, a number that has either held steady over the last 20 years or has risen slightly. In Canada, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory of Canada has found that the population there has increased by 25 percent.”

So the P-bear population is 4 or 5 times higher than it used to be. Gee, that seems really threatening. But wait, I was wrong. (which is why you should always follow the links and read things for yourself.) Mr. Dr. Expert at that web site says this is a bogus statement, and the real truth is ... um ... well ... we don’t exactly know, and we never really did know, exactly or even roughly how many bears there are or used to be. Hey, maybe because they’re hard to see? Especially in snowstorms! But let me not knock Mr. Dr. Expert On Polar Bears. He is giving us an answer, and it’s a very scientific and wordy “we don’t know”. At least that’s honest science. For once.

So maybe people should lay off hunting the bears for a few decades, just to see what happens. It worked here in NJ with our regular bears, and now they’re damn near everywhere. I’m sure that when the P-bear population rises enough so that they start competing with California coyotes for tasty little children to snack on, then it will be time to think about “managing” their numbers.

So, let’s have a tiny bit of truth in government. Ain’t nothing wrong with the polar bear habitat. And nobody can tell if their numbers are growing or shrinking. Nope, they just got the special treatment from the evinron-mentalists because they’re cute when they’re babies.

UPDATE

HA! The thing about news blogging is that everyone else is going to jump on the same story. There are no exclusives, and nobody really cares if you get there first. So Michelle Malkin has put up her version of this story, which links over to the American Enterprise Institute. Where they say, and she quotes

At present, polar bear populations are robust and, according to native people, are considerably larger than they were in previous decades. Predictions of polar bear endangerment are based on two sets of computer models: one set predicts how much Arctic sea ice will melt as a result of global warming, and the other predicts how polar bear populations will respond. But computer models of climate are known to be fraught with problems, and the ecological models used to predict polar bear response are equally limited.

Because of extreme limitations in data, it is essentially impossible to decide whether polar bears are endangered and whether their habitat is threatened by man-made global warming or other natural climate cycles. This is acknowledged by the experts themselves–the actual IUCN/SSC report is more broad in naming causes and more conservative about estimating their effects.

What we do know about polar bears is that, contrary to media portrayals, they are not fragile “canary in the coal mine” animals, but are robust creatures that have survived past periods of extensive deglaciation. Polar bear fossils have been dated to over one hundred thousand years, which means that polar bears have already survived an interglacial period when temperatures were considerably warmer than they are at present and when, quite probably, levels of summertime Arctic sea ice were correspondingly low.

In discussions of whether to drill in the Arctic, one of the arguments raised by environmentalists is that this would harm the habitats of the many creatures, including polar bears, that make their homes in Alaska. If polar bears are placed on the endangered species list, the legal hurdles to oil and gas drilling will increase.

Now, I have to say that I didn’t think of that, perhaps because the news articles I heard and read said “threatened”. But it nice to see that both AEI and Ms. Malkin notice the same Global Warming tie-in I wrote about. Even sweeter is AEI’s title for their article - “Is the Polar Bear Endangered, or Just Conveniently Charismatic?” which really says exactly the same thing I did, although maybe in a little more polished manner: the darn bears got on the list because they’re cute.

So cute

   Friday - May 09, 2008

hard choices

I haven’t blogged about the disaster in Myanmar/Burma up until now. It’s a terrible tradgedy, even though it’s an expected one. That whole part of the world over there along the shores of the Indian Ocean is subject to terrible seasonal storms. Worse, it’s the arc of abject poverty; one of the poorest areas anywhere, from Bangledesh all the way around and down to Inodnesia. I even took a pass on AlGore’s all-too-expected hissy fit that blamed Global Worming for the storm. Myanmar itself is a hell hole. What could be, and used to be, a great little tropical country has fallen under tyranny and is now nearly a slave state. Google up “blood rubies” if you want more on that. The military junta that runs the country doesn’t like foreigners. We’re all spies ya know.

So while the news reports about this catastrophe have grown increasingly more dire - 10,000 dead, 30,000 dead, 100,000 dead - the other news stories have shown that a huge multinational relief effort has been given a hard time. Cuz they’re all spies too ya know.

Now it looks like a line has been drawn in the mud: the Myanmar government has seized the aid supplies and told the aid workers to take a hike. It’s not like this place is the USA, with endless assets and money, No, this is the place that helps make the Third World the Turd Wurld. They’ll take the stuff, but they don’t want any help, thank you very much. And being a despotism, they really don’t give a shit if more of their people die and lie around rotting.

UN halts aid to Myanmar after junta seizes supplies
YANGON, Myanmar - Myanmar’s junta seized U.N. aid shipments Friday meant for a multitude of hungry and homeless survivors of last week’s devastating cyclone, forcing the world body to suspend further help.
The aid included 38 tons of high-energy biscuits and arrived in Myanmar on Friday on two flights from Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates.

“All of the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated,” U.N. World Food Program spokesman Risley said.

“For the time being, we have no choice but to end further efforts to bring critical needed food aid into Myanmar at this time,” he said.

At least 62,000 people are dead or missing in Myanmar, entire villages are submerged in the Irrawaddy delta and aid groups warned that the area is on the verge of a medical disaster.

The U.N. has grown increasingly critical of Myanmar’s military rulers’ refusal to let foreign aid workers into the country while the junta appeared overwhelmed and more than 1 million homeless people waited for food, medicine and shelter.

“The frustration caused by what appears to be a paperwork delay is unprecedented in modern humanitarian relief efforts,” Risley said. “It’s astonishing.”

The junta said in a statement Friday it was grateful to the international community for its assistance — which has included 11 chartered planes loaded with aid supplies — but the best way to help was just to send in material rather than personnel.

Nearly a week after the storm, survivors are now having to contend with rotting corpses of people and animals as they wait for food, clean water and medicine.

“Many are not buried and lie in the water. They have started rotting and the stench is beyond words,” Anders Ladekarl, head of the Danish Red Cross.

So what is it that we have here? Is this merely politics, where a weak country is being trampled by pushy UN folks coming in and taking over? Or will the thugs who run Myanmar just steal the food for themselves or to sell, and leave the citizens to rot? Where does sovereignty draw the line when it comes to disasters far beyond the ability of a country to deal with? Should they be FORCED to open their borders to WorldMed Inc, for their own good? Having been rebuffed, should the world get uppity and say “Well fine. Screw you guys, I’m going home.” and just leave these people to die?

These are hard things to think about, and there are some hard choices to make here. Where do you think the moral line is? If you were the world, what would you do?

   Wednesday - April 23, 2008

Oh Noes, now we’re gonna freeze!

Ice Age Could Be Coming!!

The scariest photo I have seen on the internet is spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.  What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades.  The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.  All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.

I guess this is what climatologists do when they aren’t pretty enough to be weathergirls on TV. They look at today’s weather and then argue about the climate. FoxNews also covers the story, even getting the date right this time. FoxNews stays true to their Glowball Worming roots, and devotes more ink to debunking this guys claims than they do reporting it. Plus they sidebar some links, one of which tells us how a warmer climate means harsher winters.

Hey, wait a second. Isn’t writing online about something somebody else said online and linking to it called blogging? What the heck does Fox think it’s doing? Damn journalists, blurring the lines again.

   Sunday - April 13, 2008

GLOBAL WARMING CENSORSHIP IS OK, BUT ONLY WHEN DONE BY THE LEFT. NO EXCEPTIONS MADE.

I sure hope it isn’t a mistake to post this on a Sunday. I think lots of ppl should read it. It’s short and tells an important story, as if any more proof were needed
with regard to the way the planet saving gweens apply pressure to any who don’t agree.  But then, ppl who cave in to their pressure are as much part of this problem. 

by Christopher Booker
The Sunday Telegraph. London

Warmists beat straying BBC man back into line

A talking point among “climate sceptics” on both sides of the Atlantic has been the bizarre tale of how the BBC’s chief reporter on climate change censored an item on the BBC website after being harried by a “climate activist”.

On April 4 Roger Harrabin posted a story on the fact that world temperatures have not continued to rise in the past 10 years, and this year will fall to a level markedly below the average of the past two decades.

Citing the World Meteorological Organisation, Mr Harrabin accurately reported that “global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory”.

This was a red rag to Jo Abbess of the Campaign Against Climate Change (Hon President, George Monbiot), who emailed Mr Harrabin demanding that he “correct” his item.

Mr Harrabin insisted that what he had written was true. There are indeed eminent climate scientists “who question whether warming will continue as predicted”.

This only angered Ms Abbess further. She said it was “highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics”, to “even hint that the Earth is cooling down again”.

Mr Harrabin, though he has led the BBC’s tireless promotion of warmist orthodoxy, stood firm. Even in the “general media”, he replied, “sceptics” highlight the lack of increase since 1998: to ignore this might give the impression that “debate is being censored”.

His item had, after all, added “we are still in a long-term warming trend”.

This was too much for Ms Abbess. She responded that this was not “a matter of debate”. He should not be quoting the sceptics ”whose voice is heard everywhere, on every channel, deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth”.

Unless he changed his item, she said, “I would have to conclude that you are insufficiently educated to be able to know when you have been psychologically manipulated”. She threatened to expose him by spreading his replies across the internet.

At this point the BBC’s man caved in. Within minutes a new version appeared, given the same time and date as that which he had consigned to Winston Smith’s memory hole.

Out went any mention of “sceptics” who question global warming. After a guarded reference to this year’s “slightly cooler” temperatures, a new paragraph said that they would “still be above the average” and that we will “soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of the global warming induced by greenhouse gases”.

Of course we have long known where the BBC stands on climate change. But it is good to have such clear evidence that, even when one of its reporters tries to be honest, he can be whipped back into line by a pressure group.

In the end, Ms Abbess still circulated the exchanges on the internet, to show the great victory she had won for the “emerging truth”.

http://tinyurl.com/53jcm3 Then scroll down short way.

   Tuesday - March 25, 2008

Must Have Been All That Hot Air

Ok, where’s Al Gore this week? Anybody know? It’s not my turn to watch him. I’m wondering if he’s been waaay down South, lecturing to all those stupid migrating penguins. Because

Huge Ice Sheet Set To Break Off Antarctica
because of
GLOBAL WARMING
which means
WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!

Ach, crivens, aren’t we done with this crapparoo yet? And didn’t this reporter get the word that it’s now Climate Change^tm so the greenies can still have their pet issue whether things get warmer or colder? Gawd, like get with times already. Making no mention whatsoever that the ice sheets in Antarctica have been at record levels this past year, we get another go at scare-mongering from CNN, the world leader in biased reporting. Amazingly, they couldn’t find some way to blame it on Bush. Hold your noses folks, here we go again:

Massive ice shelf on verge of breakup

(CNN)—Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about the size of Connecticut is “hanging by a thread,” the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday, blaming global warming.

“We are in for a lot more events like this,” said professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins ice shelf disintegrating on February 28, when he was looking at NASA satellite images.

Late February marks the end of summer at the South Pole and is the time when such events are most likely, he said.

Hold it right there buddy. First off, it’s nearly the end of March. Got an update for us? Has it broken off yet? What, no? You mean you waited almost 4 weeks to run a story about impending disaster and it hasn’t impended yet? Kinda makes me wonder. Secondly, we all noticed that last line. What passes for heat down in the land of the never ending ice cube has had all summer to work its magic, and now is the time for the ice sheets to break up. A little. As usual. Of course, fall and winter follow quickly on the heels of summer, so if this thing hasn’t broken off yet it’s probably refreezing as I write this. It’s starting to look like this is a story of desperation, your very last chance to cause a panic by pointing out a looming disaster that hasn’t happened, even though it’s perfectly normal for this kind of thing to happen right about now, so this non-event is neither looming nor a disaster. Pwned. Alarmist Ice-hole.

“As of mid-March, only a narrow strip of shelf ice was protecting several thousand kilometers of potential further breakup,” the group said.

Oh, the poor brave ice. Putting its freeziness on the line to save Mother Gaia.

Scambos’ center put the size of the threatened shelf at about 5,282 square miles, comparable to the state of Connecticut, or about half the area of Scotland.

That’s a lot of ice. Somebody better tell Tony Sinclair to get down there with an entire armada of tanker ships filled with Tanqueray Gin, ASAP! But it’s just a tiny little piece of the whole. Hardly a fingernail pairing’s worth, compared to the whole works. And that’s the “threatened” part. 220 square miles worth is what actually broke. Nada. PS - I never realized Scotland was that small. I’ve never been there, but the Scots always seem a bit larger than life, so I guess I just assumed their country was a bit larger too.

But with Antarctica’s summer ending, Scambos said the “unusual show is over for this season.”

So what’s the point of this story then, other than to try and scare us? We’ve all seen those Calving Glacier films on National Geographic. Impressive, stupendous, but in the overall scheme of things, who gives a rat’s ass?

Scambos said the ice shelf is not currently on the path of the increasingly popular tourist ships that travel from South America to Antarctica. But some plants and animals may have to adapt to the collapse.

“Wildlife will be impacted, but they are pretty adept at dealing with a topsy-turvy world,” he said. “The ecosystem is pretty resilient.”

Crivens, squared! The guy even admits it. It’s not happening, it’s not a threat, and the one or two fish that might get bonked on the head by passing icebergs can deal with it. Shut up already!

CNN. The first name in agenda driven news, even when it isn’t really news.

   Saturday - January 19, 2008

The Consensus of Experts

Found over at Watt’s Up With That?

There’s an article in the New York Times pushing a something called “the five stages of climate grief” done by a professor at the University of Montana. This got me to thinking about the regular disaster forecasting that we see published in the media about what will happen due to climate change.

We’ve seen this sort of angst broadcast before, and it occurred to me that through history, a lot of ”predictions of certainty” with roots in scientifically based forecasts have not come true. That being the case, here is the list I’ve compiled of famous quotes and consensus from “experts”.

Top Ten Science based predictions that didn’t come true:

10. “The earth’s crust does not move”- 19th through early 20th century accepted geological science. See Plate Tectonics

9. “The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.” — Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project

8. “That virus is a pussycat.” — Dr. Peter Duesberg, molecular-biology professor at U.C. Berkeley, on HIV, 1988

7. “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

6. “Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” — William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899.

5. “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” — Albert Einstein, 1932

4. “Space travel is bunk.” — Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of the UK, 1957 (two weeks later Sputnik orbited the Earth).

3. “If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” — Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M “Post-It” Notepads.

2. “Stomach ulcers are caused by stress” — accepted medical diagnosis, until Dr. Marshall proved that H. pylori caused gastric inflammation by deliberately infecting himself with the bacterium.

1. “Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F.” — Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University in Time Magazine’s June 24th, 1975 article Another Ice Age?

So the next time you hear about worldwide crop failure, rising sea levels, species extinction, or “climate grief” you might want to remember that just being an expert, or even having a consensus of experts, doesn’t necessarily mean that a claim is true.

A friend told me one time that if you are travelling with the majority, its a good bet to turn around and go the other way.

Go Fred!

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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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